Uneasy Street

by Sherman, Rachel

  So, I argue, it is not that the advantages of upward-oriented people are actually mysterious to them. Instead, like Hillary Clinton defining herself as “dead broke,” they are working hard to avoid defining themselves as privileged. Rather than trying to include themselves in exclusive categories of those who have more, they try, interpretively, to have less. In fact, by framing themselves as “in the middle” they try to attach themselves to the morally worthy category of the “middle class.” At least to some extent, I suggest, these self-interpretations deflect conflicts they feel about having more than others.4 Instead of making them feel worse, as theories of relative deprivation might suggest,5 seeing themselves as having less actually makes them feel better. Downward-oriented people are more willing to acknowledge their conflicted feelings openly. As we will see in later chapters, however, people in both categories care about inhabiting their privilege in a morally worthy way.

  LOOKING UPWARD FROM THE “MIDDLE”

  Like Ursula, the people who tended to situate themselves “in the middle” typically shared several characteristics. First, they or their spouses earned all or a significant portion of their income rather than inheriting it. Some also had family wealth, but their incomes from earnings were significant and seemed likely to cover most of their expenses. They worked (or had worked, in the case of stay-at-home mothers) mainly in finance, business, real estate, or corporate law—fields in which incomes are typically quite high. Second, their friends were relatively similar to them. A few said they desired more diverse social circles, but they tended to be talking about occupational rather than socioeconomic diversity—for instance, businesspeople wished they had more friends who worked in the arts. Finally, they were also likely to identify as Republicans or more conservative Democrats. Most called themselves socially liberal and economically conservative. And all who talked about tax increases on wealthy people were opposed to them.

  Like Ursula, upward-oriented people described New York City as an environment in which they were not especially privileged. Maya was an attorney turned stay-at-home mother, married to a corporate lawyer, with an income of over $2 million. She told me, for example, “I don’t think of us as really wealthy or not really wealthy. I think part of it is if you take where we are and you put us in Spokane, we’re actually really wealthy. But if you put us in New York, we’re just—in our circle, we’re fine. I mean, there are all the bankers that are heads and heels, you know, way above us.” Maya uses the reference to those with more to frame herself as not having that much and casts herself as essentially the same as the people she socializes with (“our circle”)—who were primarily her husband’s business associates and their families.

  These people sometimes characterized themselves explicitly as “in the middle” when referring to those above them. Helen was a stay-at-home mother who had worked in banking and was married to a lawyer, with a household income of over $2 million and assets I estimate at well over $8 million, including two homes. She told me, “I feel like we’re somewhat in the middle, in the sense that there are so many people with so much money. They have private planes. They have drivers. They have all these things. … You know, money makes everything easier. It makes it easier for you to do much more, actually. And, you know, we don’t have that luxury in that way.” Helen’s focus here is on the privilege she lacks rather than the advantages she has; although she is not complaining, she is situating herself relative to a particular set of others.

  Willa worked in advertising and, with her husband, garnered a $2 million annual household income. They and their children lived in a brownstone worth about $5 million, and she came from a wealthy family. When I asked if she felt either privileged or underprivileged relative to others in her life, she responded: “No. There are always going to be people who make more money than we do. And there are people who don’t make as much money as we do. And, you know, we found what works for us, and we’re happy with it. I mean, we were joking the other day, when we played the Powerball. And it’s like, nothing would change. You know? I mean, we’re happy with this house. You know. We have everything that we need. Our life is not going to change if we win the Powerball.” Willa also told me, of her kids’ position in their private school, “You know, they’re right in the middle. There are people [at the school] who have much more money than they do, and there are people who have less money than they do.” Willa seems less dissatisfied than Helen. But both women exaggerate the ratio of the people above them to those below. Helen looks up and sees “so many” people with more; Willa creates an equivalence between those above and those below. (Notably, Willa also frames social disparities as permanent, something that will “always be.”)

  I asked Allison, a nonprofit lawyer turned stay-at-home mother in her forties, how her current lifestyle compared to the one she grew up with. She told me, “You know, I’m definitely much more affluent. But I still feel middle-class.” She described her father’s managerial job and her parents’ household income, when she was growing up, as about $120,000 (itself well above the median at the time). She said, “We didn’t take any vacations. We never went anywhere.” This sounded very different from her current household income of about $3 million and two family vacations a year (plus millions in assets and real estate). I asked, echoing what she had said, “And so you feel like now it’s more affluent, but it’s still middle-class?” She responded: “We’re definitely middle-class. In New York City, and in that school community, we’re def—we’re—yeah. I feel like—yeah. Upper-middle-class.” I read Allison’s hesitant shift from “middle-” to “upper-middle-class” as a result of her desire to define herself as middle-class, combined with recognizing that she can’t quite do that, given the obvious differences between her childhood lifestyle and her current one. To support her interpretation, she invokes both her kids’ private school and the New York context.

  Other upward-oriented people similarly characterized themselves as in the middle, often implicitly, by framing their environments in particular ways. Zoe is a stay-at-home mother with an MBA and a household income of at least $1 million, plus family wealth, whose home is worth over $3 million. She told me “New York is a bubble. Everyone that can afford to live here is pretty well off. So you don’t see the downside. Even the [parents of] kids that are going to the schools that we’re sending our kids to. They’re able to pay forty grand a year to send their kid to school, which is crazy. So you don’t see the underprivileged. … It’s sad, but it’s kind of like the out-of-sight, out-of-mind thing, where you don’t think about it in your—everyone’s so busy that you don’t think about it.” Zoe’s comment makes clear that the people she is most aware of are those who are most similar to her, as she conflates “everyone” in New York with the “pretty well off.” Her idea that “you don’t see the underprivileged” is also notable given that nearly everyone with whom she is likely to come into casual contact is less well off than she, raising questions about whom Zoe chooses both to “see” and to define as “underprivileged.” Zoe does not locate herself as “in the middle” because she says she is “pretty well off.” Yet she classifies those who are not pretty well off as “the underprivileged,” which does situate her, in a sense, in the middle.

  I found Zoe’s view especially intriguing because, as we talked in her apartment, her housekeeper was working in the next room, offering living proof that not everyone in New York was “pretty well off.” So I asked Zoe if she thought about these issues in relation to the housekeeper and the nanny she employed. She responded, “We treat them very well,” by which she meant paying them generously, allowing them days off, and giving them used clothing that Zoe would otherwise donate elsewhere. She said, “For sure, with them, I take it into account that they’re seeing our lifestyle. And I think it’s not fair to try to demand—I want them to be happy.” Zoe knows she is privileged in relation to her domestic employees, and that matters to her to a certain extent, particularly because these individual women “see [her] life
style” (rather than because they belong to a larger group of less privileged people). She sees them because they see her. But she is not hyperaware of or conflicted about the inequality between herself and her employees in the way that others I introduce later are. Instead Zoe uses a “maternalistic” approach, which positions her as a “benefactor” and does not challenge inequalities between domestic workers and their employers.6

  As noted in the introduction, Monica is a real estate agent married to an advertising executive, with a household income of about $400,000. She told me of herself, her family, and her community of friends, “In New York, we’re middle-income.” She alluded almost immediately not to their actual income but to their consumption, saying, “None of us are ostentatious. None of us have big, fancy cars.” Here “middle-income” signals a spending style, not a dollar amount. Later she described her family’s lifestyle as follows: “I live modestly, I mean, I don’t have jewels. … There’s no flash. We’re just normal. I mean, in my world, it’s not flashy. To somebody that lives in a trailer park, I don’t know. But we live a fairly simple life.” She described the family’s evening routine of having dinner, helping kids with homework, watching TV, and going to sleep. As we will see in chapter 3, it was common for my interviewees to allude, as Monica did, to a family life that is “just normal,” comprising household habits that any family might have.

  Notably, Monica does compare herself to those below her, by mentioning “somebody that lives in a trailer park.” With this allusion, she casts herself as privileged, but only vis-à-vis people much poorer than she. Her rhetoric acknowledges disparity, but because a trailer park is a common signifier of poverty, it presents the disparity as between the middle (Monica) and the poor rather than as between the wealthy and the middle. And trailer parks are rare, if not unknown, in New York City. This trope of poverty thus becomes even further removed from anyone Monica might see in her daily life, although she could have invoked any number of poor people closer to home, from domestic workers in her own apartment to the homeless people one sees every day on New York streets. She also could have cast herself as privileged relative to those who are not poor but still have less than she does. Such a category would include, for example, most if not all the service workers she comes into contact with on a given day, including those who sell her food and clothes and educate her children.

  Justin, who had assets over $10 million and a household income of about $400,000, made a similar interpretive move that classified those with less as those with much, much less. He reframed the comparison group when he said: “I think everyone, myself included, in this nation, is obscenely rich compared to other countries. I’ve seen a lot of the country. … The poorest guy in America’s still one of the richest around. Still has a car, a house. You know, people in Africa, they don’t. They never will have a car. So from that sense [I feel privileged]. But do I say and think daily, ‘This guy walking down the street’s poorer than me?’ No.” By focusing on basic needs, such as a house and a car, Justin interprets Americans as more similar to each other than they are to “people in Africa” and implies that differences above this basic standard are less important. All of these forms of recognizing advantage tend to spotlight only the radically disadvantaged, thus eliding the significant difference between those who are aspiring to the middle and those in the actual middle of the income distribution.

  I noted previously that most upward-oriented interviewees described socializing with people of the same economic means. When they talked about exceptions to this tendency, they usually pointed to people they spent time with who had more, not less. Talia, whose husband earned about $500,000 annually in finance, said her friends were in the same financial situation as she was, except for a few “in a whole different stratosphere” of wealth. Alexis was a stay-at-home mother with a household income around $500,000 and assets over $5 million. Asked if her friends shared her lifestyle, Alexis told me, “I have a few friends who have, you know, quite a bit more money. But nothing too extravagant, like, movie star famous. But [most are], you know, similar. Still working hard, but have made enough money that they can have two homes.” To “see” only the wealthier people when thinking about their social circle is another way of establishing themselves as “not really” wealthy. Alexis also contrasts herself and the majority of her friends with those who have more by referring to “still working hard”—that is, not having enough to stop working.

  By the same token, several of those I interviewed also faced upward by suggesting that real affluence meant not having to think about money at all.7 Because they did have to think about it, they were, implicitly or explicitly, not affluent. Maya told me, for example: “I don’t feel like I can go do whatever I want to do at a store or something. I still think about all of my purchases. I still think about the children, how much money we spend on things.” Talia, similarly, said she felt as if she and her husband were “fortunate, but [we] can’t go off the rails.” She said she hoped to be able to live a comfortable life if they saved enough, which she said was necessary because they would not be receiving money from their parents. As I show in chapter 3, most of my subjects did not chafe against these limits but rather used them to show that they were prudent as well as not “really” wealthy.

  We might expect those oriented to others with the same as or more than they have to express feelings of covetousness or envy, to feel relative deprivation vis-à-vis those with more. But when I heard this kind of envious talk, which was relatively rare, it often seemed to come from anxiety and insecurity about their own financial situation rather than from a generalized materialism or status competition.8 This feeling colored my respondents’ sense of social advantage. Immediately after saying, “I feel like we’re somewhat in the middle,” Helen told me:

  I feel like we’re well-off. I mean, I feel like—don’t get me wrong. I feel like we do very well, and all of that. But I feel like we can’t take it for granted, either. You know, because it’s a slippery slope. You can easily slip into kind of being irresponsible with your money, or—not irresponsible, but just even in terms of borrowing to buy a house. … I mean, you know, all of the money we have, we made. Right? And I think it’s just stressful, you know, the lifestyle we lead, we borrow to buy things. … And it’s scary to live with that risk. And he’s working now, and doing well. But, you know, the jobs are very intense. It’s very up-or-out. If things don’t go well, you can’t really reduplicate your income.

  Here Helen acknowledges her privilege very briefly, alluding vaguely to “all of that.” Risk looms much larger in her account. Respondents like Helen, who depended on a single earner and had minimal inherited wealth, tended to be especially anxious. Several spoke of becoming more careful with money during the economic crisis that started in 2008.

  Although the fear some of these interviewees expressed felt real to me, it also seemed to help deflect a sense of privilege that they might otherwise be uncomfortable with. I saw this link between denial of and discomfort with privilege most clearly in my conversations with two African American women. In approaching them for the interview, I used the word “affluent” explicitly. I had avoided this word previously because I imagined it would trigger people’s sensitivity to talking about money. But Kelly, the friend who had promised to introduce me to the first interviewee, didn’t think she would have any problem with this word. Kelly thought Pam (the interviewee)9 and others in her circle were “proud” of their social status. She told me that when she had spent time with them they were always talking about their renovations and other elements of their lifestyle.

  I thought I should follow Kelly’s advice because she knew Pam and her friends quite well. I also thought “affluent” sounded better than “wealthy” and was less likely to provoke a negative response.10 As it turned out, however, this was not such a good move. Pam brought up the issue of affluence—alluding to my email—before I had even turned on my digital recorder. Despite her household income of over half a million dol
lars, she said, “I don’t feel affluent.” When I asked why, she said, “Well, because affluent feels like, free of money worries, in a way. You know? And it’s just, in New York, if you’ve gone down the path of saying, ‘I’m going to educate my kids in private schools’— you know, theoretically, you’re doing well. But it’s a big commitment.” Later Pam described herself as part of the “middle tier” at her child’s private school. Describing a luxurious home where her daughter had gone for a play date, she said, “See, in this context, we don’t feel affluent. At all.”

  In these comments Pam primarily described a feeling of financial insecurity and located herself in the middle. But eventually it became clear that she also felt uncomfortable with the idea of being affluent. She had been raised working-class, and her parents were active in fair housing and civil rights struggles. She attributed her discomfort with wealth to this background, saying, “It took me a while to shake this off. I mean, I think we grew up with this sense of distrust for rich people. So I had to work to get over that.” At the end of the interview, she told me she and her husband had gotten into a fight about whether they were part of the 1 percent. Although their income put them well into this group, she was relieved to hear that the cutoff for the 1 percent in terms of wealth was beyond their assets of about $2 million. Pam’s reaction highlights the way the cultural emphasis on and critique of “the 1 percent” can obscure privilege, as I noted in the introduction; if Pam does not have to think of herself as in this category, she can claim, at least to herself, that she is not privileged.

  Around the same time I also interviewed Beverly, whose household income was about $2.5 million; she and her husband owned assets of several million dollars, plus two homes carrying only minimal mortgages. Yet she was so uncomfortable with my use of the word “affluent,” she told me, that she had almost canceled the interview. She said, “‘Affluent’ is relative. … I have friends that just went away [on vacation]. … They went on a private plane. So it’s a relative term. I mean, I have lots of friends that—most of my friends don’t. But I’m just saying, there are those. You know. And so, I don’t know if affluent’s the right word [to describe me]. That’s affluence.” As a way of not interpreting herself as affluent, Beverly keeps her eye on others who have more rather than on the reality that “most of [her] friends don’t” have private planes. She also said, again invoking the local context, “Maybe in Denver, I might be considered affluent. But I don’t know if in New York, affluence would be the word. That’s my opinion.”